Views of the world from a tiny island

“The shortest answer is doing the thing.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

I have had more on my mind lately than emoticows and would be posting many a blog on each of the various thoughts that catch my attention like jingling keys and the bits of shiny stuff I’d normally follow, BUT the bloody Internet connection here sucks balls this week so I’m stuck struggling even to send emails.

While I have a slight and fleeting chance of getting something up … in the blog sense, of course … I’m going to smoosh a bunch of stuff into one post with the hope it doesn’t end up like a peanut butter, pork chop and prune sandwich and is somewhat digestible.

Ah, yes! The joys of island life …

Aside from the distance, shit Internet, the difficulty of finding a ______(fill in the blank: plumber, electrician, gardener, carpenter, mason … whatever) who will know what they’re doing AND show up, water issues, bad parking, a propensity to blast crap music from fridge-sized speakers and the lack of Mexican restaurants, life here is pretty good.

We have the most beautiful beaches in the world, lovely mountains and forests, tropical weather, a relatively low crime rate, a postal service that works, clean streets, free education and health care, freedom of religion (and freedom not to have one), and some bloody well interesting people.

Almost no one comes to Seychelles casually. It’s too far from anywhere just to drop by and getting here takes no little effort. There were no people living here at all only about 300 years ago, so even the ancestors of early inhabitants would be considered newbies is most places.

Sure, we now get our share of the rich and famous … and royal … popping in for a week or two for holidays in paradise, but it takes an effort and a special sort of person to call Seychelles home for any length of time.

That being the case, I have had the great good fortune of meeting some very special people.

One comes to mind very much now with this week marking the death of Ernest Hemingway, the author of my favorite literary quote, “The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs” … and a lot of other great stuff … and the man I immediately think of whenever I hear crowds shouting for “Papa”. (How disappointed I’ve been to find it’s the pope they’re yearning for!)

I was a kid when he took his life, an action that put paid to the wonderfully succinct combos of words that grabbed and held and took me to bars I’d end up drinking in in later years, although not to the extent he took the pastime.

So, I never met the man, which is probably an okay thing since he wasn’t known for having a way with children:

… [he] once told his puking ten-year-old son, “I’ll fix you a Bloody Mary — you’ve just got a hangover.”

I have, however, met and count amongst my friends, Hemingway’s pilot. Okay, one of Hemingway’s bush pilots in Africa, but the only one to join Papa in two … count ’em TWO! … crashes, and both within 2 days.

On January 21, 1954, Ernest and Mary took off from Nairobi, with veteran pilot Roy Marsh at the controls. Taking off from Costermansville – today’s Bukavu – the tour was to continue to Entebbe via Murchison Falls.

“But then it happened,” recalls Emmanuel Eyenga, who has brought some guests in his boat to a point near the waterfall. A post with a sign on top it is jutting out of the water. Written on it is “P.B.M. 9026”.

“That was the registration number of the Cessna. It came down right here,” Eyenga says.

While approaching the falls, Marsh had overlooked a telegraph line at the lodge. The pilot managed to make an emergency landing, but the civilised world was far away.

Headlines like “Ernest Hemingway lost in deepest Africa” were splashed across newspapers and obituaries on Hemingway were already appearing in the US even as the search for him continued.

Then, as a passenger plane on a flight from Entebbe to Sudan changed course, the pilot looked down and saw the Cessna.

The trio were picked up by the SS Murchison which took them to Butiaba on Lake Albert. There, they ran into a pilot named Reginald Cartwright, who convinced Ernest, Mary and Roy to fly with him to Entebbe where the world’s press were waiting.

But Cartwright crashed the plane while taking off. Hemingway managed to escape the wreckage only by smashing a door open – with his skull.

Roy Marsh lives here in Seychelles. Now in his 90s, he’s still dashing, charming, witty and wonderful … and smells like the most delicious combination of beer and cookies, for some reason. (Well, the reason for the beer aura is pretty obvious.)

When I first met Roy some years ago he was still playing a few sets of squash every week and could be found in town most any day he was in the country, speeding around and socializing.

Slight and quiet, the man has stories that continue to amaze even on the third or fourth telling and writing about him has been a goal for me for a long time … any excuse to spend hours in the company of such a perfect manifestation of a sort of man that just doesn’t exist in today’s world in any number that can’t be counted on one hand.

It’s Roy who makes me wish the work talked about in this article had come along sooner, although I doubt he’d be lining up for it:

If Aubrey de Grey’s predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

For sure, Hemingway wouldn’t have been interested, an idea made clear by the fact that he took himself out of the game.

There are many theories put forward on why it was Papa topped himself 50 years ago … including injuries resulting from the second of those plane crashes he shared with my friend Roy … and a new one makes sense.

Some have blamed growing depression over the realisation that the best days of his writing career had come to an end. Others said he was suffering from a personality disorder.

Now, however, Hemingway’s friend and collaborator over the last 13 years of his life has suggested another contributing factor, previously dismissed as a paranoid delusion of the Nobel prize-winning writer. It is that Hemingway was aware of his long surveillance by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, who were suspicious of his links with Cuba, and that this may have helped push him to the brink.

Writing in the New York Times on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, AE Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World, said he believed that the FBI’s surveillance “substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide”, adding that he had “regretfully misjudged” his friend’s fear of the organization.

That Papa had a good imagination is not a question, and what that can do when mixed with fear based on fact is not easy to live with.

No doubt Hemingway suffered from depression. Many writers do. This article in the Times explores the links tying depression, writers and suicide, including Papa, of course.

It is not surprising that these mood disorders seem most at home in the artistic mind. “The cognitive style of manic-depression overlaps with the creative temperament,” Ms. Jamison said. Researchers have found that in a mildly manic state, subjects think more quickly, fluidly and originally. In a depressed state, subjects are self-critical and obsessive, an ideal frame of mind for revision and editing. “When we think of creative writers,” Ms. Jamison said, “we think of boldness, sensitivity, restlessness, discontent; this is the manic-depressive temperament.”

William Styron, author of that cheerful little ditty,”Sophie’s Choice”, wrote about his battle with depression … a fight he never won, but that did not kill him … in Darkness Visible, one of the most helpful bits of writing I have ever been commanded to read.

This is not to say that one must be depressed to write, nor that all depressives can. Sunny dispositions can lead down primrose paths to libraries, but life’s hard edges and awareness of them … even hyper-awareness … does add grist to the mill and grit to the pulp.

But we’ve become so afraid of death that we refuse to actually live. We’re scared of the sun because it might give us cancer; we’re scared of a well-marbled steak because it might raise our cholesterol; we’re scared of bullfighting—the only real sport—so we demean ourselves with yoga and Pilates and other such unholy abominations. The closest we come to genuine thrills, genuine danger, is watching IMAX 3-D superhero movies.

Hemingway, however, knew that death isn’t the worst thing in the world. “[C]owardice is worse, treachery is worse, and simple selfishness is worse,” he said. (Also: staying married to the same woman for more than five minutes.)

Perhaps our safety-padded commercial existence is why young people are increasingly drawn to his life and works. Our entire lives are planned out for us before infancy; deviating from the standard path—SAT > college > 24/7 job—is nearly impossible. (Hemingway didn’t bother with college, instead going straight into the trenches of WWI as a medic, proof that an English degree is truly worthless.)

Independence used to mean defining your own existence; now it means paying your own credit-card bill. Freedom used to mean an open road and uncharted waters; now it means choosing between BlackBerry or Droid data plans. Living on our own terms is a foreign concept, but Hemingway bent the world to his liking through sheer gusto, which is very different than the illusion of choice on sale at the Apple Store. Why speak the truth, consequences be damned, when a single impulsive tweet can cost you a career?

Would love to carry on with this for a while, but my Internet connection just might … right now … allow me to post, and I have to go out and unclog a pipe full of shit since the plumber didn’t show up.

Depressing? Well … not exactly a party, but it does give me something to write about.

14 Responses

ok first of all “peanut butter, pork chop and prune sandwich” freaking eww.. If I was not on a strict diet I might have lost my apatite for a month with the thought of that medley of food. ~smiles~ I guess in the end not even paradise is perfect, which in of it self is both an amusing and a depressing thought, and maybe just maybe leads to the belief that paradise exists merely in the way the way we see things. Anyway love the post, never really read any Hemingway, never been much of a book person before now, Though I have always been an info junky, I have probably not read so much in my life like I have over the last few years. I think that those who are hyper aware do make better writers, just cause I think that pain is a great teacher, if you konw enough pain it makes it easy to put yourself in other peoples shoes and understand them

Mission accomplished on the sandwich thing then, as I mean to convey what I hoped not to make.

Read some Hemingway, Bobby. You won’t be sorry.

Imagination, which is what it takes to put oneself in the shoes of others, makes pain more acute, I think, as it allows one to anticipate it, experience perhaps more of it that one would like, and remember it with embellishment. Certainly not a comfortable way to be … not as if one has a choice in the matter … but fodder.

I agree, I think that most people remember pain as less of what it was. As you say the imaginative experience it as more and though not a comfortable way of being, But some of us have to fill that place to

any type of sandwich is fine, life is far more digestible when you are able to successfully put up posts! My daughter and I were in consensus just the other day that, generally speaking, good children’s literature is considerably more enjoyable than most classic adult literature, due to the higher levels of true creativity. You, dear Sandra, are one of the rare exceptions.

One of our boys went through a time when he made ridiculous sandwiches, the only requirement being consumption, which he reliably did. Around six years of age, he would glob on such things as cottage cheese, baked beans, all varieties of mustard, bbq sauce, pickles, cooked veggies, you name it, into the sandwich it went. All items in fridge or cabinet were fair game.

Another of our boys drew great delight around age 3 from sitting with his older sister and her friends, gaining their undivided attention with his considerable charm, then conspicuously eating a large ant he had been keeping for just such an occasion. This behavior persisted until sometime around age 5, he was bitten by an ant and became convinced in his young brain it could only be revenge for his previous bad behavior towards ants.

The ability to intensely feel emotion, both our own and others, is both a blessing and a curse. It has taken many years for me to realize that what seems clear tho, is not really clear to most. The past ten years or so have brought a curse which Fred refers to as “young Goodman Brown syndrome.”

Before anything else, I wish you a very happy birthday, Amy! Young Goodman Brown aside … and your husband is not only well-read, but astute … I’ve never felt life to be as much a test of faith as that of endurance.

My brother introduced me to peanut butter, dill pickle and mustard sandwiches as a child, and although I now forgo the bread, PB&P is a dipping fav form me to this day. Eating living things, however, is a bit worrying, so I’m glad the bug bit the kid at an early stage.

Thanks for the kindness. I do have some kid lit in the works and should finish it. I even manage not to swear over many, many pages. Proud of me, Amy?

hehe, proud of you? of course! Swearing came naturally to me and was such a useful tool for self expression. At one point, it did became necessary to curb the habit. Years ago, we were staying with some very dear friends for a few days, who happen to also be completely conservative teetotalers. Our lovely six year old daughter cut loose with a good, loud “God dammit Eric!!!” at her then two year old brother. Now our children are nearly all adults, and it gives me great good humor to let loose with an occasional expletive and observe their considerable shock as they digest and resolve the inner conflict it creates!

Thank you for the birthday wishes, but getting older does kind of suck!!

Fred is far better read in adult literature than I am, which really is remarkable due to his significant struggles with dyslexia. Having never read Young Goodman Brown, it has been explained to me as being overcome with the realization of all the evil in the world.

Looking forward to the upcoming kid lit!! The presence of a public library in our small town was a real life saver for my mother, sibs and self. If they did not have an item on their shelves, it could be ordered from the book mobile which would bring it in a week or two from Topeka or Kansas City if necessary.

You mentioned Hemingway’s pilot, Roy Marsh. He has had an extraordinary life and it should be recorded to inspire others. He is a descendant of the FRASER family, who were powerful dynamic people having great influence on politics and government in the UK from about 1890 to around the middle of last century.